I am not talking about discouraging, i am talking about being a jump up, something that involves a decision.

Why should the heroic modes be a clear jump instead of an extension to the difficulty?

I am fine with either model on a personal level. However, having too big of a jump between the two formats would be quite a hindrance to guilds that aren't finding the appropriate challenge in the normal modes and are not yet on the level to get very far into the current heroic modes. If the initial heroic modes were too hard, these guilds would be in the same situation as the ones that couldn't get past the first normal mode encounters, the guilds that many here were supporting. Is that a good design?

Taking into account the nerfs to the initial normal mode encounters, I do feel that the curve from LFR to normals to heroics is for the most part smooth and acceptable at this point. There are always few hiccups and that is acceptable. They also make the designs feel less clinical and streamlined.

Originally Posted by Crashdummy

The challenge doesnt ramp up that much, because you can choose the order in Heroic. H Ji Kun is not harder than Lei Shen N either.

Being able to cherry pick the easier heroic modes merely means that the guilds can progress through the instance in a more linear fashion as far as the difficulty is concerned. This mostly helps the guilds that are not at the vanguard of progression. I would also be surprised if the difficulty was ramping up extremely fast considering the amount of bosses in the instance.

It is also worth mentioning that Ji-kun posed a challenge on 25-man heroic. I've heard he was quite the pushover on 10-man from the get-go. That is inconsistent balancing and a mistake.

Originally Posted by Crashdummy

The thing is, the easiest heroic difficulties are easier than harder heroic ones.

I'll take it you mean that they're easier than the hardest normal encounters.

The easiest heroics modes are often devoid of mechanics. They are both overgeared fast and easy to understand, focusing more on the tuning of the numbers. This is one of the reasons why fights like Lei Shen and Lich King occasionally surpass such encounters in perceived difficulty. There is no doubt that sometimes these heroics modes are also tuned far too easy. Saying that this has been the case in ToT is still somewhat arguable from my point of view, though you did state that you would rather see the heroics as a bigger step up in difficulty.

Looking at the overall situation none of the normal modes apart from Lei Shen can actually compare to the heroics. In Lei Shen's case he will end up posing a bigger challenge for some groups than the first one or two heroics modes that they complete. This seems appropriate due to them being completely different types of encounters that offer different types of challenges. The relative difficulties also vary depending on at which point of the tier you're looking at them.

That said, I would support the idea of lifting the requirement of killing the last boss of an instance in order to access the heroic modes. This would prevent the scenario of an undertuned "prize" heroic being gated behind the final boss and give the guilds more alternatives. Despite some of the positives, the current model seems slightly unnecessary.

Originally Posted by Crashdummy

This was seen very clearly in T14, where some people that couldnt finish HoF had many MSV heroics completed.

Difficulty-wise the MSV heroic modes became old content already during T14 because of the tuning to a lower item level. This made some encounters such as Gara'jal fairly basic.